ANSWERS: 3
  • Legalese. They don't want to be held responsible if: a) You drop the keyboard and break your foot. b) You spill your beverage on the keys and get a shock. c) Poke your head under the desk, get caught up in the cord, and asphyxiate yourself. As outlandish or cynical as this may sound, it's true. Notice how all of the coffee cups you get from fast food places say, "Caution - Contents may be hot!"? If just one person has EVER been even slightly injured by a keyboard, or conveivably could, the company wants to protect themselves pre-emptively. Hence the sticker.
  • While the other post is humorous and contains a great deal of truth about litigation in America, there's more to it than mere lawyering & cynicism about the stupidity of the average human. Even if your PC is turned off, a phone modem is still be drawing power from your phone-line, and this can give you a nasty shock. Also, even if your PC is not connected to any cables at all, there ARE places (particularly in the monitor and the "power supply", a roughly squarish, 2-fist-size, fan-cooled silver box inside the main PC box) where there may be capacitors storing a charge that can give you a nasty shock. In general, the 2 areas of a PC that you should never try to repair yourself are the power supply and the monitor. Replace them, instead-- don't try to repair them. Going briefly back into the world of cynicism, it's also quite possible that the manufacturers of your PC simply prefer that THEY do the repairs, NOT YOU. Toward that end, they may put on the outside of the PC all kinds of warning labels, all the way from "no user-serviceable parts inside; Warranty void if seal broken" all the way up to "Beware of the Leopard".
  • Another source of serious injury can come from CD- and DVD-drives. These components employ small red lasers, which can do damage to your retina if you are so incautious as to have the PC on while these drives' cover is off. These drives generally have large yellow warning labels on them, in addition to any labels that might be on the outside of the PC.

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